It was far from the usual Coke and a smile. The Coke was diet for one thing, and there were two smiles involved. One of them belonged to Donald Trump, seemingly the world’s foremost Diet Coke lover, and the other to James Quincey, CEO and chairman of Coca-Cola, who presented the returning president with a commemorative Diet Coke bottle on Tuesday night.
Of course, Quincey is not the only CEO offering something to Trump lately. Donations to Trump’s inauguration fund have reportedly been pouring in from the heads of several corporations, including Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon. Maybe their leaders are just trying to position themselves on the president’s good side for his second term. Perhaps they’re rolling out the red carpet in earnest for deregulation and corporate tax cuts. Perhaps both. But either way, they’re also sending an unmistakable message: Welcome to the era of anti-woke capitalism.
As many social media users have pointed out already, Coca-Cola had quite a different message four years ago. Without calling out Trump by name, the company released a statement on January 7, 2021, condemning that year’s riot on Capitol Hill and calling the event “an offense to the ideals of American democracy.” The many similar corporate statements at the time put a punctuation mark on four years in which pushing back against some of Trump’s extreme statements and policies proved a standard corporate practice.
Many of the tech industry leaders darkening Mar-a-Lago doorways lately, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, spoke out openly against the administration’s travel ban in January 2017. The CEOs of Apple and Microsoft did so as well. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz went so far as to announce a plan to hire 10,000 refugees over the ensuing five years in response to the ban. (While Starbucks did not meet that goal, the company’s 2023 global impact report claims it got more than halfway there.) Later in 2017 came the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, during which a white nationalist killed a counter protester with his car. After Trump responded by blaming “both sides,” CEOs from Merck, Intel, and Under Armour all resigned from presidential advisory councils in protest.
Progressive corporate messaging continued over the next few years, with Nike recruiting Colin Kaepernick for a controversial ad campaign and Airbnb condemning Trump’s border policy. The trend hit a flashpoint, however, in 2020. CEO statements of solidarity flooded out in response to George Floyd’s murder that year at the hands of police.
Conservatives strike back
Although pundits like Fox News’s Sean Hannity had occasionally called for boycotts on outspoken companies during Trump’s term, in the years afterward, key influencers on the right brought out heavy artillery.
In 2021, for example, future GOP presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy released a book titled Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. In it, he took a flamethrower to the idea that corporate responsibility amounted to anything more than “virtue signaling.” According to Ramaswamy, the CEOs pushing back against Trump, or promoting progressive causes in 2020, had just been cynically pandering to the loudest liberal voices.
During the Biden administration, however, the loudest voices belonged to people like Ramaswamy and conservative activists such as Chris Rufo. Months after the release of Woke Inc., another future GOP presidential contender, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, rolled out the infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which forbade teachers in Florida from alluding to sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom. When Disney publicly denounced the bill, they incurred much more heat than a segment on Hannity. Instead, DeSantis waged what Disney later called in a lawsuit “a targeted campaign of government harassment.”
It was the dawn of a new era. Corporations publicly in favor of social justice would now have to deal with political agitators like Rufo, who consulted on DeSantis’s bill and appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show repeatedly to ensure Disney stayed in Fox News viewers’ crosshairs.
Virtue signaling gives way to anti-woke
With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, the war on “woke capitalism” and “virtue signaling” now appears to have ended. What comes next? If the past couple months are any indication, the U.S. may be entering an era of anti-woke capitalism and vice signaling.
The same corporations that once publicly committed to antiracism have lately committed to validating the conservative backlash that followed the summer of 2020. Although many companies had already begun to reassess their DEI policies in recent years, the number of major players that have done so since the November election is staggering. That list includes Walmart, Boeing, McDonald’s, Facebook, Amazon, and Nissan, who had lately been the target of a pressure campaign by conservative activists.
Bezos and Zuckerberg have stood out among the coterie of CEOs welcoming Trump back to the White House, with an excess of vice signaling. Before the election, Bezos quashed an endorsement of Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, from running in the Washington Post; since then, Amazon has acquired a documentary about Melania Trump, reportedly shelling out $40 million to the first lady for it. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has jettisoned fact-checkers from Facebook, calling them “too politically biased.” He also burnished his anti-woke bona fides by appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he claimed that most companies today need “more masculine energy.” Both Bezos and Zuckerberg are said to be attending Trump’s inauguration.
Although the CEO of Coca-Cola has neither publicly expressed his thoughts on gender, nor spent exorbitant sums on documentaries about members of Trump’s family, his actions are just as telling. He paid homage to Trump this week, despite the president’s unwavering belief that the January 6 insurrection was not “an offense to the ideals of American democracy,” but rather “a day of love.” Quincey’s winking nod to Trump’s famous love of Diet Coke is not just a gesture to Trump that all’s forgiven, but a message to anyone with a negative memory of the years 2017 through 2020.
“Don’t worry so much this time,” his smiling photo seems to say. “Maybe even have a laugh. And by the way, don’t forget to drink Coke.”